The Teaching
Profession
As
I first came to know the university, it was a teaching institution.
Senior professors continued to teach first-year classes at
Illinois until about the time I became a department head, but by then
so many freshmen were taught by assistants that one of my main concerns
had to be finding good people to supervise them. Within just a
few years, even this sort of work was regarded as demeaning in an
environment overshadowed by thriving,
commercially driven technical
innovation, especially in electronics and medicine. "Research"
had become a university banality like "state of the art," and "cutting
edge," and "excellence." The university was credited with such
profitable innovations that its
policy had come to be driven by research and its budget by federal and
industrial grants. Research in the humanities, on the other hand,
scarcely affected
the national economy. Like the social sciences, they could at best affect only
perceptions.
Historical studies became split between "humanists" and social
scientists. Research in literature had hitherto meant
uncovering new texts or new historical and biographical
information. That is slow work, often measured in
lifetimes. Today's university was
demanding continual evidence of
ongoing
research. The less earthshaking the
findings, the more important became sheer numbers of
publications. Numerous specialty
presses quickly emerged throughout the world catering to this new
academic industry.
My
predecessor as department head, the linguist Frank Banta, had enlisted
several
bright, energetic young men focused in one way or another
on the then new theory of signs, semiotics. One of them, Albert
Borgmann, becoming a philosophy professor at the University of Montana,
succeeded in addressing larger contemporary problems: The Nature of Information at the Turn of
the Millennium (University of Chicago, 1999). Werner
Abraham, today at Groningen, focused on linguistic theory with
several collections of essays, e.g., Knowledge
and Language with Eric Reuland, 1993. Such editorial
activity became typical, although I
omit it in the following. Peter Foulkes, a
deft critic (The Search for Literary
Meaning, 1975; and Literature
and Propaganda, 1983) went on to Stanford, then took
the German chair
at Cardiff. Götz Wienold (Die Erlernbarkeit der Sprachen,
1973), is today at Constance.
My own recruits tended to be very
devoted teachers, but also had to yield to the pressure to publish. James McGlathery taught
Romanticism (Mysticism and Sexuality, E.T.A. Hoffmann,
1981; Fairy Tale Romance: the
Grimms, Basile, and Perrault, 1991; Grimms' Fairy Tales : a History of
Criticism on a Popular Classic, 1993; E. T. A. Hoffmann, 1997; Wagner's Operas and Desire, 1998). U. Henry Gerlach, who
took charge of basic German instruction, continued the traditions of
German positivism, not merely in
documentary
research and in objective interpretation, but also in collecting his
own essays: Einwände und
Einsichten, 2002). I admired the
comparatist Herbert Knust not only for his diligence and flair in
teacher training but for his astonishing ability to direct student
plays and
even musicals like The Threepenny
Opera. His book on Bert Brecht's Leben des Galilei came out in three
editions after 1982, because it was indeed directed toward university
students. The same is true of Elmer Antonsen's A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic
Inscriptions, 1975. Like McGlathery, Knust,
and
Gerlach, Antonsen eventually became
department head at Illinois. James W. Marchand commanded a
prodigious memory and
an
astonishingly broad range of knowledge, especially in historical and
scientific fields. I believe that Marchand made the important
difference in my own life by demonstrating to me that there is no
field not open to anyone who will only take the trouble to
learn. This view, new to one trained in an era of esoteric
specializations, was most refreshing. It meant that any
individual could judge all things for himself.
As time passed, I became convinced that the
rare bright sparks in history are minds unintimidated by
authority. This was the distinguishing character of my most
revered
Germans, Martin Luther, Wolfgang Goethe, and Albert Einstein.
Luther had found his world, and indeed a large part of the world, subject to a mammoth
bureaucracy. I decided that the authority inherent to all
organizations, however essential to accomplishment, constitutes the
seed of their corruption. Goethe's astute research into visual
perception convinced him that the physics of his day was simply
mistaken about the nature of light. He devoted much of his life
to writing the first history of science, in an attempt to understand
how Isaac Newton could have been so universally followed for so
long. The refutation of Newtonian authority still had to await
the work of Albert Einstein. Harking back to Luther, Einstein was
careful to articulate how a
religious attitude toward truth
is not without its influence on the total personality of scientific
man. Aside from what presents itself to his experience, and the
rules of thinking itself, the researcher recognizes as a matter of
principle no authority whose decisions or utterances can lay claim to
'truth'.
I wondered what the "rules of thinking" might
be. I hit upon such basic notions as 1) Cicero's plain demand
that "your utterance has to
be either true or false or you are not saying anything at all,"
sharpened by Carl Popper's demand that the valid statement must be
vulnerable to falsification; 2) the
rule of parsimony called "Occam's Razor"; 3) Hume's insistence that one
make clear distinction between "is" and "ought to be"; 4) avoidance of
other well-known fallacies like "begging the question," petitio principii, of which Hume's
rule may be but one instance. I considered the importance of
humility, and Count Alfred Korzybski's
principle that your "map" is not the same as the "territory" it
describes.
It struck me that all the above
mirror common rhetorical devices taught by the ancients. They
explicitly recommended the irrefutable truism, copious eloquence,
confusion of
the factual with the factitious, and drawing conclusions which have yet
to be demonstrated--all as effective oratorical techniques. They also
cautioned that one sometimes
applies these ruses in order to persuade oneself. Obviously,
what I was calling "rules of thinking" are no more than tests for
honesty, and could be multiplied almost indefinitely.
I concluded that there remains
only one rule
of
thinking, namely Einstein's "religious attitude toward truth."
Truth may be
ephemeral, even transcendent, but there is just no other honest
guide. It must never yield priority to any ideal,
however noble, be it humanity,
peace, justice, liberty,
equality, fraternity or what the buzz of the moment may be--to
their ardent supporters these
all constitute an unquestioned authority. --During my
time in academe, the very saddest lesson was
learning how frequently, even
routinely, the cardinal rule of
thinking was authority, sometimes questioned, but ever obeyed. A
prominent instance was peer review, mentioned above, and other
normalized evaluation techniques. There is
nothing scientific about peer review, of
course. Some argue that its purpose is to avoid error, but that
is a bureaucratic
goal, not a scientific one. As many have observed, error is the
very substance of science, Carl Popper having even argued that no
advances ever occur except by way of error. This is an article of
faith, of course, faith in the ultimate triumph of candor and
good will.